


Dave, Falling

by Heart_Of_Steel_And_Fandoms



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Child Abuse, Drug Use, Ghosts, Homophobic Language, I mean it's Klaus so, Just the once, Look I'm sorry I just take a canon character and develop him I don't make the rules, M/M, SO, Sad, Vietnam War, War, anti-war, but still, this happened?, tw homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:35:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21733111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heart_Of_Steel_And_Fandoms/pseuds/Heart_Of_Steel_And_Fandoms
Summary: A short character story of Dave from the moment Klaus- literally- falls into his life."Klaus, looking at him with something like adoration, something like despair, something like eternity in his eyes, leaning forward to brush their lips together in the softest of caresses.Their first kiss is just that- soft. Cautious. Gentle in a way Dave has only seen Klaus be in quiet moments right before dawn, staring into the fog and forests as though searching for something he couldn’t bear to see, but cannot imagine not having."
Relationships: Dave/Klaus Hargreeves
Comments: 5
Kudos: 58





	Dave, Falling

“Are you a religious man, Dave?” The new recruit asks without turning his head, voice hushed so as not to wake the sleeping men between them.

Truth be told, they should be asleep as well, lulled into the falsest sense of security by the rocking motion of the bus on the way to war. But something is scraping at Dave’s consciousness, an itch of something half-dreamt and half-remembered, a flash of blue light and expressive, terrified eyes.

He answers as honestly as he can- truth is a luxury, he’s learned, and one that is only ever shared among the infantry and not the commanding officers. Who is he not to meet the passing whim and curious gaze of a man sent to die?

“I say my prayers.” The recruit’s gaze falls to his chest, the glint of metal from his tags where Dave knows he could trace his name and denomination and serial number even through the fabric.

The recruit- he looks no older than a boy, really, underneath a too-large helmet and a haircut frankly outrageously inappropriate for the army. For a split-second Dave wonders- and almost goes to ask- how it is that he slipped those locks by the recruiters and generals, but as the war goes on he supposes even regulations begin to feel the strain of desperation and dying ranks.

The recruit glances up again, and suddenly despite his helmet and hair and youthful face, Dave sees only a weary and exhausted man. His eyes, blue and haunted, blue and heavy, blue and shimmering like the sky during a summer storm, are borne above the sharpest glint of cheekbone, and Dave is hit, low in his gut, with an unexpected rush of heat.

He flushes, and were the recruit’s pretty, beautiful, deadly eyes not already on his face he may have been able to pull it off as something other than interest. But as it is, Dave can practically feel that gaze lingering on the redness of his face, and he knows, with a certainty that borders on the eerie, the exact way this new recruit of his will smile in delight at his blush, and the teasing shape his mouth will make as it twists up at the corner.

He huffs, once, before the other can do much more than grin, and sits back in his chair as though to sleep in an attempt to pre-empt the teasing in whatever form it takes. It takes far longer than it should for him to fall asleep, and he feels the eyes as a physical presence until he slips into unconsciousness.

.

Dave doesn’t have that many childhood memories that he can look back on with anything resembling fondness- not after his father stumbled across the Beefcake Mags and half-empty jar of Vaseline crammed beneath his bed and beat him senseless, yelling about how he couldn’t have a faggot for a son.

It’s difficult to reconcile the man Dave remembers from his youth, a little lost in the bottle and distant, with the puce-faced anger and cracked voice from their last encounter. Most of the time Dave doesn’t try.

One of the few untouched memories he has left is his mother, some unspecified time and place, angrily telling him off for calling his teacher a dove and a coward for not immediately signing up for the war.

He must have still been in middle school when it happened, and he didn’t understand why her voice broke a little and her jaw tightened above her Star of David chain when she told him not to be so quick to judge- but he gets it now.

God, he gets it.

They’re just cannon fodder, Big Brother’s tiny plastic soldiers like the ones he used to save up to buy on the corner store that melted beneath the mid-western sun, cheap and easily-replaceable with none of the victories he imagined.

Delusions of grandeur and heroism are the first of war’s fatalities, he’s found, and for a few moments' relief he’s not the only one who’s smoked marijuana from the barrel of a shotgun.

But Klaus- their new recruit- is something else entirely. Dave has yet to see him sober, and they’re in each others company more hours than not.

They’ve been at the front for all of two weeks, and that irritating and dangerous heat has yet to unspool from the bottom of his stomach whenever they cross paths. He’s more distracted than he can afford to be by thin fingers and impossibly dark eyes, and it would be easier to deal with if Klaus wasn’t fucking _everywhere_.

Playing half-mad games with the local children during Dave’s rounds, gesticulating wildly enough that he almost knocks the clinging bodies off his back while running through the village. 

Bright-eyed, telling wild, impossible, fantastic stories over canteen mush to the desperate, awestruck boys trapped in too-large uniforms and too-early deaths- tales of half ape-men and monsters of the deep erupting from human flesh and computers tiny enough to fit the world in a man’s pocket.

Lazing, slow and sensual, on canvas bunks that have never looked so good as when Klaus’ long legs are draped over them, pipe with drifting trails of sweet-smelling smoke and collapsing ash that hardens in the mud during dry-season loose in his hand.

Giggling wildly, dancing in a grind beneath strobe lights, more than Dave can bare without sacrificing himself to the haze of liquor and placing his hands on those delicate, sharp, _damned_ hips.

He can’t breathe with it- stale air caught in his throat on a thready exhale from the sheer challenge held in those eyes.

They dance, near enough to ride the edge of indecency without being overt, hands glancing and away on every heavy beat that thuds through the floor, through the air, all the way through to the erratic beating of Dave’s heart.

He’s never done anything like this before. Before, there had been family, and faith, and future to worry about, a myriad of reasons not to indulge despite the wanting.

But here, in this Godless, lawless land, in stolen moments and tension from the barest of glances- here, with Klaus’ tongue sweeping across raw bitten lips and promising all sorts of escape, with their looming deaths and closer looming pleasure- Dave can do nothing but allow himself to fall.

They kiss behind gauzy curtains, made brave by mutual assurance of desperation, and it’s nothing like Dave had dreamt it would be as a boy.

No child can imagine this- Klaus, smoke on his skin and thrumming with the same restless, careless energy of all men before assured-death, riding high on who-knows-what but sane enough to drag them to a corner with at least some semblance of privacy, tasting like everything forbidden and good in the world.

Klaus, looking at him with something like adoration, something like despair, something like eternity in his eyes, leaning forward to brush their lips together in the softest of caresses.

Their first kiss is just that- soft. Cautious. Gentle in a way Dave has only seen Klaus be in quiet moments right before dawn, staring into the fog and forests as though searching for something he couldn’t bear to see but cannot imagine not having.

Their first kiss is full of longing, but their second...

Their second kiss is pure heat; frenetic, frantic energy without means of escape except through the feeling of Klaus’ tongue and lips on his.

There is no doubt that Klaus has experience- his hands in Dave’s hair pull with nothing short of calculation, the thigh between his legs a careful choice to render words immobile in Dave’s chest, but jealousy does not aptly describe how that makes him feel.

He cannot be jealous that it took him this long to get his act together, nor begrudge Klaus his courage. He wishes- in the smallest, quietest part of him- that they could have met younger. That they could have met anywhere other than here.

Klaus kisses him until he forgets his regret, and falling has never been easier than with someone waiting to catch him.

.

If there’s one positive thing about this draft- and that’s a big ‘if’- it’s that nobody cares what anybody else does, not even the higher-ups if they can pretend not to notice. Bodies are bodies, after all, regardless of what those bodies do in their free time, and the army never seems to have enough.

Klaus and Dave are perhaps the worst kept secret in their barracks, but it’s a close tie.

Theirs is an infantry of draftees, all of whom have their own reasons for not volunteering and vices to help cope with what they could not avoid- the smell of marijuana, despite the crackdown, is etched into the very fabric of their tent and uniforms; Dave has seen more than he’d like of all the men as they empty their pockets into the waiting hands of local women for an hour’s respite; and the black market for illicits practically runs out of the back of their infantry truck when they’re stationed long enough in one place.

Amidst all of that and the constant thunderous reminder overhead of what they’re facing, Klaus and Dave always volunteering to take night shift together is hardly of concern to anyone important.

They’re discreet about it- as discreet as Klaus seems capable- but it’s hard to judge a man his methods of dealing when he’s seen you piss your pants in fear and helped you cart a limb-less friend to the waiting medical staff for treatment.

The men joke about it, more often than not, and Klaus seems incapable of taking it as anything other than good-natured, often times joining in and escalating until the original perpetrator brightens red from the words Klaus wields. Dave is constantly amazed by the filth Klaus is capable of spewing across canteen tables and mud hills, and by his seemingly innate ability to make people laugh in the same turn.

There is something so fragile about laughter in places like this; wisps of cloud that seep out of torn-open lungs and disappear into the night. When every laugh could be your last, it’s especially hard to find one more- in this, Klaus is nothing short of miraculous.

He is not a good soldier- Dave wonders how desperate they must be now to let someone as untrained as Klaus wield a rifle, but he is selfishly, unquestionably grateful all the same- but he is a good man, and in an army that has an endless supply of the first and an aching lack of the latter, nobody in their infantry is willing to sacrifice theirs for something as trivial as finding solace wherever he can.

.

They get 10 months; 9, if they only count the time from their first kiss on.

9 months.

They pretend, in the empty spaces between terror and rage, that they are somewhere different, somewhere they can _be_ without first resting their guns against the mud wall of the watchpost. They hold each other through night horrors, the real and the imaginary, and Dave has grown gluttonously accustomed to the feeling of Klaus’ hand in his.

9 months.

He knows that Klaus is Not Okay, in a different way than the rest of them are. Sometimes, just before the dawn when he thinks Dave is sleeping, Klaus will leave the circle of his arms and the tomb-quiet of the tent, movements jerky and desperate.

Dave followed him only once, to ensure his safety. He does not know who ‘Ben’ is, but he thinks he must have been someone special for Klaus to call out for him for as long and brokenly as he does. 

9 months.

Klaus mutters to himself a lot. At first, Dave had thought it was the drugs; then, the war. After a while, he stops questioning why when a far more pertinent question is how he can help. The words are almost beyond hearing, but he’s grown quite skilled at interpreting the tone.

Consolatory. Fearful. Angry. Delighted. The entire spectrum of human emotion, hummed into air bereft of life with a depth of intention Dave does not understand.

He finds that if he reacts to the tone, wears the correct facial expression and radiates calm, Klaus settles, loses that harried, panicked air, mutterings coming slower and less viciously than before.

One night, around month 6, Klaus spears him with a look over a deck of cards. “I know what you’re doing.” he says, mouth too amused to be harbouring resentment, and Dave just shrugs.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he starts, straining to be heard over the torrential rain, “But as long as you don’t want me to stop, I’ll be sure to keep doing it.”

Klaus grins as he throws an ace down, effectively winning the game and earning a disgusted snort. Dave reshuffles and starts a new round, determined to finally win this one.

Klaus looks quietly at his hand.

His beautiful eyes are weighed under by exhausted despair, and Dave would be more concerned if it was not how he had always looked, from that first fateful greeting. There is something ethereal about Klaus, something otherworldly in the way he stares into empty space as though it’s not and speaks of things he should have no business knowing.

Dave is not blind, nor stupid- there are a lot of things he does not understand about Klaus, and though he tries not to, he has amassed a collection of farfetched theories. He huddles over them when he discovers something new and fascinating, picking through and inspecting for irregularities, hoping to one day stumble across one resembling the truth.

He will never tell Klaus about them, despite the fact that none of them are unkind. Klaus deserves more than suspicion and judgment, when he has given neither.

“I don’t want you to stop.” Klaus finally says, fragile like laughter in a warzone, still not looking up from his hand, and Dave fights back the giddiness in his chest.

They play in silence, and Dave finally, _finally_ wins. He gets the distinct impression Klaus let him.

9 months.

Despite all of it, everything working against him, and his own claims of being a sceptic, Klaus continues to be the most hopelessly, hopefully optimistic person Dave has ever met.

Klaus says they’ll have forever- whispers in the dead of night of a future Dave doesn’t dare imagine for fear of losing it.

Dave knows better. Men like them, wars like this; they do not get happy endings.

He has never wanted more to be wrong.

.

He isn’t.

.

He wishes he could tell Klaus he loves him one last time. He wishes they could have gotten the future they whispered about into the darkness of dusk beneath a foreign sky.

He wishes Klaus wouldn’t look at him like that, with something like adoration, something like despair, something like eternity in his eyes, spilling over with rain-fall tears, uncontrollable and threatening to wash everything they’ve worked for away.

He wishes he could hear what Klaus was saying, but even his skill of picking up tone does nothing against the rapid thud, thud of his own heartbeat like a migraine in his skull.

He wishes he wasn’t leaving Klaus alone.

He falls, and there’s no one to catch him.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay. So. This happened?
> 
> I started writing this back when TUA first came out, and then had the sudden, desperate urge to finish it the other day. Here ya go!
> 
> This is my first foray back into writing fic after a fairly long absence, so I appreciate all feedback, comments and sharing <3
> 
> Here's hoping Season 2 brings Dave back, because they deserve happiness, damn it! Give Klaus happiness and respect 2020.


End file.
